Category: Losing Your Belly

There is a lot of information out there on how to lose weight. Unfortunately, this information very often does not take into account our individual differences or our unique biology. If you are someone who has a slow metabolism, then you will burn fewer calories than someone who has a very fast one.

If you are someone who is very tall, then the amount you need to eat is different than it is for someone very short. Even more extreme though are the differences between men and women and the strategies that work best for each. If you are female and you are trying to lose weight, then here are some tips that you might not have read before…

Lift Weights

The biggest tip that every woman should know when it comes to weight loss, is that they should try weightlifting or another form of ‘resistance’ training.

In other words, women should drop the over-reliance on cardio exercise and start lifting weights!

Many women worry about this because they think that they are going to get ‘too bulky’ and that the resultant look will be unattractive.

In reality though, it is actually very hard to become bulky and especially for a woman. What’s more likely is that added muscle mass will simply speed up your metabolism (muscle is what we call ‘metabolically active’) and that will allow you to burn fat at a faster rate.

In fact, this is one of the main reasons that men lose weight faster than women!
At the same time, lifting weight will help women to gain the right proportions, to tone up and to increase their tone and definition in order to get rid of things like cellulite. It will even increase the production of fat burning hormones!

The fastest way to get a more attractive body as a woman is to lift weights.

Consider Other Lifestyle Factors, Medications and Conditions

Hormones play a large role in fat burning and muscle mass and the biggest drivers here include testosterone and estrogen.

So, women are at a disadvantage already when it comes to burning fat but things get more complicated still when you consider the other factors involved: things like the menstrual cycle for instance which causes hormones to fluctuate at different times of the month.

More of an issue is the role of contraceptive medication which can cause weight gain or weight loss depending on how the body reacts.

Then there are conditions like polycystic ovaries which only affect women and like hypothyroidism which is more common for women. If you find it very difficult to lose weight, consult your doctor.

And make sure that you are eating well and getting all of your nutrients in order to support your body’s metabolic function and hormone balance.

Finally, note that these hormones also impact on emotional eating – which studies confirm to be a larger issue for women versus men. Keep this in mind and try to maintain your emotional state while avoiding temptation as far as you can.

If you want to lose weight, then you need to start eating less and more healthily. Many of us are not the size we want to be and the primary reason for that is that we eat too much and we eat too much of the wrong things.

The problem is that it isn’t as easy to fix your diet as you might initially expect. Eating right means that you need the money to spend on fruits and vegetables (that tend to go off in no time at all) and you need the time to prepare all the food and clean up afterward.

If you’re going to start eating healthier then, the smart thing to do is to think ahead and to make this as easy as possible so that you don’t get caught out by a lack of time, motivation or space. Here are some ways to do that…

Get the Right Appliances

If you want to make cooking in the kitchen easier, then there are a ton of appliances and gadgets that can help you to do just that.

A great example is a blender or a food processor. This can be used to mix fruits into a smoothie, or to mix vegetables into a soup.

Either way, this will give you a ton of highly beneficial nutrients in an easy-to-eat form factor that will only take a few minutes to prepare.

Another good example is a dishwasher. This will wash up your plates and dishes for you after you’ve eaten, meaning you’ll need to spend less time washing up after you have finished and can spend more time cooking and preparing your food as a result.

Learn the Right Recipes

Of course being able to cook quickly also comes down to having the right recipes. This is why it’s very much spending some time to learn meals that are quick and easy to prepare while still containing lots of highly beneficial nutrients and being low calorie.

Cook in Bulk

Common advice is to cook at the start of the week and then simply heat it up to eat during the week. This is a nice idea but the reality is that most of us don’t want to give up an entire Sunday to cooking.

A better solution then will often be to cook at the usual time but to prepare larger batches. This way, you’ll have spare food that you can enjoy on other evenings.

You can even freeze some for further in the future. Crucially, this process doesn’t take any longer than cooking the usual portions.

Eat Consistently

One particularly important tip is to try and eat more consistently during the day. That means eating a relatively samey breakfast and lunch. While this isn’t as exciting as eating fresh and original meals every day, you’ll still have the evening to do that.

For breakfast and lunch though, you’ll now be able to get your food faster without having to count calories or learn new recipes.

Looking to lose weight fast? Then unfortunately there is no substitute for simple exercise and healthy eating. While this is true though, it’s also true that you can make life a little easier for yourself with a few smart tricks to speed up the process and help you lose weight more efficiently.

Read on and we’ll take a look at some of the best hacks out there for more rapidly melting away fat…

Cut Out Sugary Drinks

Did you know that a soda drink like 7Up has as much sugar in it as multiple Cream Eggs? Too often we forget about what we drink but actually, this is often responsible for a lot of additional calories.

Just as important as this are creamy coffees like cappuccinos which are also very calorific and of course alcoholic beverages like beer.

Switch to water and you’ll instantly burn a lot more calories!

And the Rest

There are other sources of calories that are very often overlooked. These include things like butter on your bread and sugar in your tea.

Make sure that all calories are accounted for!

Eat More Slowly

Eating more slowly can help you to feel fuller and digest your food better meaning you get greater vitamin and mineral absorption.

If you struggle with this, make a conscious effort to chew a certain number of times on each mouthful.

Drink More Water

Drinking more water will accelerate your metabolism and once more help you to digest your food better and break it down more.

Exercise First Thing in the Morning

While you sleep, you are not able to eat. This means that you are essentially fasting and when you wake up, you will have very low blood sugar and a high amount of fat-burning hormones like adrenaline.

If you exercise during this time, then your body will have no choice but to burn fat. Studies show that as a result, fasted cardio helps you to burn more fat and more calories than regular exercise. Try going for a run first thing in the morning.

Eat Carbs After Exercise

Another reason that fasted cardio works well is that it lends itself perfectly to carb backloading.

This is a system where you consume carbohydrates only after intensive exercise. By doing this, you are able to ensure that the calories you consume are used to replenish depleted stores of glycogen in your cells – rather than being stored as fat.

Double up on these strategies by running early in the morning before breakfast and then eating something with complex carbs when you finish.

Take Cold Showers

A cold shower will not only burn calories directly (as the body uses energy to try and heat itself back up) but will also increase the release of adrenaline and not to mention testosterone.

Sleep More

One of the times we burn the most fat is when we sleep, so make sure you are getting enough and that the quality is high too.

Walk

Finally, note that one of the very best ways to burn fat is to walk more. Look for ways to fit more walking into your routine and you’ll burn fat without tiring yourself out!

When we say ‘body of a fighter’, we are not really referring to boxers. Boxers tend to have a higher body fat percentage and more rounded look. Rather, we are talking about martial artists who tend to look highly honed and lean. These are fast and powerful fighters that look healthy and mean.

They also tend to have certain features that are more dominant than others. As well as low body fat, they tend to have large triceps, pecs like armor plating and ripped mid-sections.

How to Develop Speed and Power

The most important principle to keep in mind when looking to transform the body is ‘SAID’. This stands for ‘Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands’.

In other words, the challenges you face the body with will trigger changes that make it better able to cope with those same challenges in future.

Thus, one of the best ways to get a fighters’ body is to hit a punch bag. This is a great way to develop hand-eye coordination, to build muscle in the shoulders, pecs, abs and triceps and to burn fat through ‘concurrent training’ (cardio with added resistance).

To get started, find some combinations and throw these repeatedly until you are too tired to continue. Remember to use your hips and legs to drive the punches forward.

Combine this with lifting heavy weights using compound movements. This will train the entire body in unison while demanding maximum muscle fiber recruitment and coordination from the body.

Diet

On top of the correct training, it is also crucial for a fighter to eat the right diet. This should be a diet that is high in protein to support muscle synthesis, as well as complex carbohydrates and fats to provide a steady supply of energy for training.

As is always the case, simple carbohydrates such as cake and chocolate should be left out – as these provide no benefit for the body while encouraging weight gain!

Most guys say that they want to lose their belly fat and would like to get a flat stomach. While this is an understandable aim however, it is also a rather unambitious one. Because surely what most guys would really like is to have a ripped set of six pack abs!

A six pack is one of the best indicators of overall health and fitness. It’s a look that the opposite sex finds highly attractive and that is most often sported by Hollywood actors, cover models and top actors.

It also happens to be functionally very useful and able to improve your performance in just about every movement and sport.

So how do you go about getting the look?

Diet

The first thing of course is to diet. That means you need to try to maintain a rough caloric deficit, as well as concentrating on precisely how and when you are eating your food in order to try and ensure that you don’t encourage your body to store any more fat than necessary.

Doing this will allow you to lower your body fat percentage and this is important because it is what will allow you to get your abs to show through your stomach.

Often you will hear that you will have visible abs as long as your body fat is sub 10%.

This is true, as at this low level of fat, even underdeveloped abs will protrude and be visible. However, if you combine exercise as well (see the next section), then you won’t need to get your percentage that low.

Someone like Chris Evans (Captain America) is a great example of how good your abs can look at around 12-15%.

Exercise

With that in mind then, you also need to focus on training your abs to increase their strength and make them thicker and thus more visible. To see how this can look, try contracting your abs right now.

You’ll find they instantly become more visible, which shows just what a difference the size of these muscles makes.

Your abs are actually made up from multiple muscle groups, but the part that creates the six-pack look is called the rectus abdominis. This is the sheet of muscle on the front of the stomach that is used in order to prevent the body from bending backwards and to help us lean forward.

To train this area then, you need to perform exercise that involve bending forward such as sit ups and crunches. What’s important is to make sure you feel the rectus abdominis doing the work and that you are folding at the stomach.

In other words, do not allow yourself to bend at the hips, in which case you won’t really be working the abs at all.

Another tip is to train the transverse abdominis too. This is the band of muscle that wraps around the core and that holds the stomach in while supporting the back.

This is what will help to keep your stomach flat, while the rectus abdominis gives it the detail.

Fitness Trackers are all the rage right now, with devices from companies like Fitbit selling in huge numbers and being pretty ubiquitous. Wearing a Fitbit is as much a fashion statement as anything else though. This is a way of communicating to the world that you ‘do fitness’ and that you are up to scratch with modern technology.

What’s less clear, is just whether or not a device like this can really help you to lose weight and get into better shape. Read on and we’ll take a look at how something like a Fitbit stacks up in real-world testing and how you can use it to your advantage.

The Good

First, let’s take a look at what fitness trackers do well. The first and most important thing that you will get from your fitness tracker is motivation and awareness. At their most basic, fitness trackers are devices that can count steps (pedometers) and tell you roughly how many calories you might have burned on that basis.

This can then bring home the reality of your current activity levels. Many of us will be shocked for instance at just how little we move during the weekends. Those who work in offices and drive in in the mornings like equally find that they actually don’t move much Monday-Friday.

Seeing this reality written in plain English can make it hard to deny and can encourage you to move a little more and to increase your general activity levels.

This gets even more powerful when you consider the social elements that many fitness trackers come with. A lot of fitness trackers will also let you see how your friends, family and partner are doing in terms of their fitness goals – or to challenge them to see who can move the most in a set amount of time.

This too can be an excellent tool for encouraging more activity and getting you to head outside and move more.

Then there are the additional tools and features – things like being able to follow guided workouts and HIIT routines for instance.

The Bad

There are downsides to fitness trackers too however. The first is that they are not usually particularly accurate. Heart rate monitoring is only possible to a degree if you aren’t wearing a chest strap and even then, it is only somewhat correlated with calorie burn.

Many activities can’t be picked up by a fitness tracker at all and while the notion of making sure you burn more calories than you consume (tracked through a fitness tracker and diet app like MyFitnessPal), this can also be an overly simplistic way to monitor your diet that doesn’t take into account such things as your micronutrients or your hormonal balance.

In short, a fitness tracker is a fantastic tool for helping with your weight loss and it can be very useful. However, it is also important not to rely on them or to perceive them as any kind of ‘silver bullet’ that will help you to magically lose all your weight.

There are many ways to approach weight loss but one of the most popular options these days is to invest in buying an ebook, an online course or a set of DVDs. These programs are widely available online and through TV ads and they promise to make weight loss easy by giving us all the information we need laid out in front of us and removing any and all guess work.

But do these diet plans really work? Are they good value? And what can you do to get the most from them?

The Cynical View

One thing to consider is that diet plans can often be over-priced and poorly thought out.
This is not to say that they are ineffective or that the authors don’t know what they are talking about. Often though, the plans are designed in such a way that they will be very difficult to stick to and that most people won’t be able to keep them up for long.

These can often include elaborate eating plans that involve lots of preparation and cost a lot of money, or they might involve lengthy workouts.

Either way, this is not a concern for the author – as from their point of view they will still have sold a product that worked and the only problem was with your inability to stick with it.

Then there is the price.

A training program that costs several hundred dollars might be worth it in terms of the results, but there is no getting around the fact that most of the information is probably available online for much less.

This makes the product poor value at best and certainly not a good way to spend your cash.

The Promising Aspect

That said, this is of course not true for every training program. Some programs will be written with longevity in mind by people who really care.

And some will be available for much less, or will include lots of extras – perhaps personalization.
Personalization is important in fact, because everyone is different and different training programs work better for different people.

With all that in mind, you should have a better idea of what to look for and hopefully you can decide for yourself what would be good value for such a program.

More Advice

Perhaps the most important tip of all though, is that you mustn’t wait for your training program or treat it as gospel. Too often, people will read training programs and buy training programs almost as a form of procrastination.

This is like an unspoken agreement between the seller and the buyer.
While advice can make a big difference and help you to train faster, the reality is that losing weight should not be complicated and essentially amounts to eating less and exercising more.

You can start doing this immediately – there is no need to wait for a training program or diet plan. Don’t use it as an excuse!

There are many different schools of thought when it comes to losing weight and there are many different systems, diet plans and strategies that claim to be the most effective in the world.

Of course not all of these can work equally though and so your job is to try and weed out the winners from the losers and to identify which strategies are most effective generally and also best suited to your specific lifestyle and biology.

For your consideration then: carb backloading!

What is Carb Backloading?

The basic idea behind backloading is that you are going to time your meals, or more specifically time your consumption of carbohydrates.

You’ll do this in such a way as to eat carbs like bread, pasta and others only immediately after you have engaged in intensive cardiovascular training.

More specifically than that, you will be timing your consumption of simple carbs in order to follow HIIT workouts. That means that you’ll a low-carb or no-carb diet for the majority of the day and then when you’ve finished an intense training session, you’ll be able to permit yourself to have some pasta or a sandwich.

Why Does it Work?

The idea behind this system is to first empty the energy stored in the muscles (glycogen) before turning to carbohydrates. What this is thought to do is to create a demand on the body that will ensure that the new sugar influx is not stored as fat.

You see, the body only stores excess sugar as fat when it doesn’t have any use for it. If your blood sugar is low when you eat, then your body will use some of the incoming sugar rather than store it. Unfortunately, low blood sugar also stimulates the release of many hormones and it doesn’t take much to get a good supply back.

Conversely though, the body also stores a small amount of energy in the muscle cells as glycogen to allow us to run and fight when we have low blood sugar and we are burning energy too quickly to rely on fat stores.

When this is depleted, the first priority for the body (after powering basic functions) is to restore this energy. Thus, any carbohydrates that you eat within a short window of opportunity will be sent to the muscle and not the belly.

How to Get it Right

Before you try this system, it is important to note that it doesn’t work if you only use steady state cardiovascular exercise. A gentle jog will use up the blood sugar and then turn to fat stores. Conversely, if you sprint or go at 100% output, then your body will have no choice but to use glycogen (because burning fat is too slow).

We can only maintain max output for a short amount of time though and this is where HIIT comes in – as the perfect way to use up this form of energy and create that necessary demand.